Top Feeder Companies to Columbia B-School

Columbia Business School seems to love MBA applicants from Deloitte Consulting. The Big Four consulting firm, a major recruiter of MBAs, has the largest single contingent of students among this year’s incoming MBA candidates: nearly 5% of the Class of 2013.

Deloitte has placed big elsewhere this year. The firm has sent the fifth largest single group to Harvard Business School, the seventh largest to Wharton, and the second largest to the Johnson School at Cornell University.

According to an analysis of Columbia’s Class of 2013 Facebook page profiles, Deloitte has twice as many MBA students in the class as McKinsey & Co., the second largest supplier of talent to the program this year. The Facebook sample shows 20 former employees from Deloitte versus 10 from McKinsey.

Rounding out the top five company feeders are Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Booz & Co. More consulting firms and financial companies filled out the top ten feeder companies to Columbia: Accenture, Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Corporate Executive Board, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. The only exception to the dominance of consulting and investment banking? The U.S. Army which has half a dozen members in the Facebook sample.

The Facebook data provides a rare glimpse into the educational and work backgrounds of the students accepted and enrolled at Columbia Business School. B-schools keep this information close to the vest, never disclosing this information in typical class profiles. Yet, it can often loom larger in admission decisions than an overall grade point average, a GMAT score, or the quality of the required essays. In fact, a company’s track record in sending employees to a school can often be an important sign of that firm’s stature in the eyes of admission officials.

The Columbia data was collected from the Facebook page for the Class of 2013. Poets&Quants was able to identify and confirm the undergraduate backgrounds of some 409 members of the class of 548 students who enrolled this August. (Columbia says it expects to enroll another 200 MBA students in its January start term). We then used that sample to estimate the number of students from any one institution in the full class.

There’s an extraordinary likeness to the incoming classes at other top schools. Ten of the top 13 feeder companies at Columbia, for example, are among the top 13 at Harvard Business School this year. The only three exceptions not among Harvard’s top 13: Accenture, the Corporate Executive Board, and Deutsche Bank. The companies were identical to Wharton’s top 11 firms with the exception of only Citigroup and the Corporate Executive Board.

The full list of Columbia Business School’s feeder organizations includes 21 employers that have just two students in the sample and an estimated three in the class. They range from financial players such as Gabelli, Glenview Capital, Lazard, PIMCO, and the Royal Bank of Scotland to Kraft Foods, Northrup Grumman, and Travelers.